“I would not look up,” a former Battle Creek prostitute said. “I had my head down. I was afraid someone would see me. It was horrible.”

Tina Arredondo was hooked on heroin and needed cash for drugs when one of her friends said turning tricks is easy money.

“I started staying in dope houses and a couple of the girls I used to stay with said, ‘I know how you can make good money,’” she said. “And I was introduced to prostitution.

“I was desperate,” she said. “I was desperate. You do what you do to get your drugs.”

During a 13-year career selling sex, Arredondo said she was called names, beaten, raped and, for 21 minutes, was dead when she overdosed.

“The people who drive by us and say bad things don’t know the personal hell we are going through. We have an addiction and a disease. I have so much shame and guilt because I knew what I was doing was wrong. I was not raised that way.”

Arredondo has left that life behind her, but about 20 women regularly walk the streets of Battle Creek, selling sex to men who pull their vehicles to the curb. They also are contacted by customers on the Internet at places like the “Back Page.”

They are the focus of a group of Battle Creek professionals seeking ways to help women out of prostitution.

The group, organized by Battle Creek Police Chief Jim Blocker, is trying to find help for the women who want it. The group met for the second time Friday and agreed a first step is to learn more about the women who prostitute themselves and the men who pay for sex.

“We also want to know what resources are out there and do we have the right people at the table,” Blocker said in an interview last week. “What do we have here that we have to work with. We are dealing with exploited people and there are so many facets about what that means and how they are exploited.”

While streetwalkers are only one portion of the prostitution problem in Battle Creek, Blocker said the group will start there and determine what will work to help the women.

“That will allow us to crawl and walk and run with this program,” he said.

“Street walking is the easier part of the problem. It is defined and we know it when we see it and we are familiar with it,” Blocker said. “We can scoop them up and deliver them to other options. We can find them solutions as to why they are there.”

It was a long road from her middle class home to selling herself along the side of a city street, Arredondo said.

Arredondo said her grandmother worked at the Kellogg Co. and her mother at Post. She had aunts and uncles in business for themselves.

“It didn’t stem from my childhood. I had a nice childhood and my family is close.”

But she began drinking and smoking marijuana when she was 14.

“It was acceptable,” she said. “I was just curious and I was young and I thought it was cute.”

She worked and lived with her boyfriend and their children for several years but continued to drink. One night a friend convinced her to try crack cocaine, and when she lost her grandfather in 1999 she began using opiates to dull the pain.

“My grandfather was my life,” she said. “He called me the queen. I was devastated.”

She took pain pills and when that ran out she turned to heroin, which was cheap and available.

The drug took over and she quit her job and eventually gave up her children to their father.

“I was using drugs and going in and out of their lives, and they needed a stable environment,” she said. “I couldn’t take care of my kids.”

It was about 2000 when someone suggested prostitution as income and a way to keep her supply of heroin.

Her tricks paid for the drugs but took a toll.

“Nothing is easy,” she said. “It is degrading and it takes everything from a woman. After selling my body I used more drugs and I needed more money.”

Other women told her the work was easy.

“Just get high. I would be so medicated it would not even matter.”

Arredondo had sex for money about eight times a week. She typically received $100 to $150 each time but also as little as $50. Other streetwalkers will turn tricks for $20.

“I had my regulars,” she said. “They might get me a room for a week or two and we would have sex and they would take me to eat and buy me clothes and I would go buy my drugs.”

Some found her on the Internet, but when there were no customers she walked the streets.

She spent time with other sex workers, turning tricks together and getting high, sometimes in abandoned buildings or cheap hotel rooms.

They knew it was dangerous, she said.

“You would get some freak who wanted to put clamps on you and spank you. Girls have gotten beaten up and got really hurt.”

A few years ago one woman was dragged into some woods near Capital Avenue and severely beaten.

“He hurt her really bad and it scared us, but not enough to keep us off the streets.”

What has kept Arredondo, 45, off the streets was the day she tried to steal a purse from an older woman inside Kmart.

“I was high and I don’t know what I was thinking. I had money in my pocket. I don’t remember.”

She woke in the county jail and when she learned what she did it changed her. After years of drinking, taking drugs, giving up her children and selling her body, she had reached the bottom when she tried to steal from another person.

“It’s unacceptable,” she said. “My aunts and grandmother are older and I never want to be a threat to anyone, ever. I had a lot of guilt and shame if I am at the point where I might hurt someone.”

She said the experience Sept. 2, 2013, was the low point that convinced her to change her life. She never was able to speak to the woman but said she was grateful she was not hurt and grateful that she found her way out of the drug dependency and prostitution.

“I would want to tell her I am sorry.”

Something inside told her it was time to quit the drugs and the prostitution.

“God was telling me it’s time to change my life. I have done it long enough.”

Rather than prison, Arredondo was enrolled in Calhoun County Drug Court administered by the circuit court.

She has been clean for a year and has plans to attend school to finish her GED and then move onto college and become a counselor and help others.

And helping others means providing them with a way out of that life, she said.

They need housing and help with drug problems, she said. In some cases it means protecting them with clean needles and condoms until they are ready for a way out.

“We need help. The women out there are scared,” Arredondo said. “They don’t have anywhere to go. They are drug addicts and prostitutes.

“They begin to accept their fate of addiction and beatings and prostitution because they feel worthless.

“I had not been treated like that before, but I left my kids and was prostituting and with all the shame and guilt I felt I deserved it. Girls are getting abused because they feel like they are losers. We are not bad people. We made bad choices.”

Jennifer Fopma, director of SAFE Place, a women’s shelter, said those working in the sex business did not grow up deciding to be prostitutes.

“Most were molested at a young age and have substance abuse problems,” Fopma said. “Now they are in a cycle and it is all they know or feel it’s their only choice. They can be good people in bad circumstances.”

Joyce Siegel, manager for Sexual Assault Services/Bronson Battle Creek, said the problem is complex and not just one for law enforcement.

“It is a good idea for us to take a look at the broader problem than just a crime,” she said.

Prostitution is a problem for residents of affected neighborhoods, but “prostituted people are being exploited by those who are partaking in that and purchasing them,” Siegel said. “It is not healthy for those who are being prostituted and those who are engaging prostitutes or the neighborhood.”

Making the activity a crime can contribute to problem, said the Rev. Emily Joye McGaughy of First Congregational Church in Battle Creek.

She worked for 3½ years in San Francisco helping women who wanted out of the business.

“I think criminalization is part of the problem,” she said. “I don’t know what the approach is, but the likelihood of those engaged in the work coming forward is directly connected to if they or their customers are getting arrested. I want to do community work and not criminal work.

“If any woman needs help and wants to find another different way of life, I am going to reach my hand out,” she said.

She said the San Francisco program provided housing, which was a major need of sex workers.

“Having a safe, secure location out of the neighborhood is a big piece,” McGaughy said. “And there was an incredible need for intensive trauma-based therapy.”

While she wants to gather more information about the sex trade in Battle Creek, she believes the women need help.

“I would try to set up multiple avenues for those who want to stay in to do it safely and with integrity, or establish comprehensive programs for those who want to get out. And if we just give them labels of criminals, it seems that gives people in society a reason to dehumanize them.”

Blocker agrees the problem won’t be solved by police.

“It is a social problem, a societal problem,” he said. “There is illiteracy, low education, poverty, personal insecurity, abuse and crime. I just have a small slice but the police department is looked at as the gateway and the sole provider. But I am looking at my community and saying we all own this. I need some help.”

Arredondo said the women working in the sex business need help.

“That girl is high on the corner. She is sick or wanting to get high. They can change their lives they just need a little help.”

Without help the future is not good.

“Some will overdose and some will die. A lot of them don’t make it. The bottom line is they have jail or institutions or death.”

Call Trace Christenson at 966-0685. Follow him on Twitter: @TSChristenson.